1. What privacy problem are you solving?
We are looking to acquire more validators for Incognito network to make the network more secure and to gain more awareness for Incognito in general.

2. What is the solution?

The solution is to promote the whole Node category, which includes:

Node Virtual

Node (device)

Node Pool

Here is a simple comparison:

Node Virtual

Node

Node Pool

ROI

~122%

~86%

~57%

Level of expertise

***

**

*

Initial investment

$20-40/mo

$399

Any amount of PRV

Node Pool was launched in April and received a lot of positive feedback and reaction from the market. While it is very flexible to begin with, we do find that Node is a better option because it’s both easy and efficient. The plan for May is to do a strong push to bring more adoption to Node device and keep maintaining Node Pool and Node Virtual.

Last but not least, we are also expecting to pre-launch Node Tree this month.

3. Which solutions do people resort to because this doesn’t exist yet?
People are currently staking crypto at a super low annual rate (Tezos 5%, Cosmos 10%, Tron 4.32%, etc…), or they need to go through a complicated setup to run their own node. In general, the staking experience at Incognito, whether via Virtual Node, Node, or Node Pool, is simpler and more profitable.

This chart below simply explains why the Incognito Node is preferable to other options.

Zcash, Monero miners: because they already care about privacy. Incognito is more user-friendly.

Helium, Coinmine owners: because they are already interested in buying crypto hardware devices, and Incognito arguably solves a more meaningful problem.

@Annie - a member of growth team. I’ve been with the project since the beginning supporting validators.

@Ducky - a member of the Growth team. For the past 3 months, she has been working on increasing Incognito exposure.

@phuong has over 10 years of experience as a senior software engineer. He’s been with the project since the beginning, leading the backend team. He built trusted bridges like BTC, ETH/ERC20, TOMO, BNB/BEP2, ZIL, and XMR. His team will add Ontology, Ripple, NEO, Cosmos, EOS, and more, soon.

@Linh.n - an industrial designer from the Incognito product team. She is the one responsible for the Node device design and production.

@Tan_Nguyen a member of the wallet core team. He is now the front end engineer responsible for Incognito Wallet.

5. Why do you care?

I believe that we should have control over our information. Incognito is designed to giving people the choice of claiming their right to privacy. To do that on a meaningful scale, however, Incognito needs to grow itself into a strong, secure and decentralized network. Increasing the number of validators is integral to that goal.

Node is doing surprisingly good over the last week, so @ducky and I are actively reaching out to the recent customers to understand them. Hopefully from there, we can craft a buyer persona and scale. I’ll send in more updates later.

As for non PRV holders, the plan is to acquire users that are now holding other ptoken in the platform. We test out with Node first by running a promotion campaign: “Buy Node. Pay in ptoken. Get x% off.”

We looked over the statistics in the pdex and shielding volume. Some popular coins in the platform now are DAI BNB MATIC REN TOMO BAND XMR. We decided to go with DAI first.

Product side, the “Pay with ptoken” is being coded, hopefully end of next week, we can roll out this promotion program.

I was wondering how do we know these new nodes aren’t organic and are from the teams’ work? I understand Node Pool was started for this effort and thus the new nodes generated from pooled staked can be attributed to the teams’ work. But, not sure how the other figures came to be, and how they are parsed out from people organically signing up?

I also noticed we have quite a few validators unstaking their nodes. Is there an effort to retain validators once we have them? Currently, I see there are 57 validators in the unstaking process: https://incscan.io/network/validators

I was wondering how do we know these new nodes aren’t organic and are from the teams’ work?

Good question here! Apart from the Node Pool, I believe that Node Virtual and Node are quite enjoying an organic growth.

The team focused on supporting current users, making info clear and easily accessible to potential validators and improving Node buying experience, which I believe that it does contribute to the overall growth of the project.

Also, we are very clear about what we planned for, what we did and what the deliverables were. We usually set up tracking and look into GA to define if what we are doing actually works and contributes to the growth. You can refer to April proposal, in which we reported every week what we do, what seems to work and what does not.

Rick_Shah:

I also noticed we have quite a few validators unstaking their nodes. Is there an effort to retain validators once we have them? Currently, I see there are 57 validators in the unstaking process: https://incscan.io/network/validators

My guessing is that those unstaking nodes are partly from Constant, partly from Node owners who want to change into regular staking (now that they earn enough 1750 PRV), so I will sleep on this for a while.

Node is doing surprisingly good over the last week, so @ducky and I are actively reaching out to the recent customers to understand them. Hopefully from there, we can craft a buyer persona and scale. I’ll send in more updates later.

Have you guys worked out on the target audience and then plan to convince those people? would be interested in hearing out those ideas.

Sorry that I missed to comment at the beginning of the month. As each type of target audience group per product is different, it might be better to reset kpis for every type of node instead of having just an accumulated one.

to be honest, the plan seems to be so vague that it doesn’t shed any light on guaranteed return.